


back in your own world

by Missy



Category: Stay - Shakespears Sister (Music Video)
Genre: Character Death, Character Study, Longing, Multi, Romance, Watching, Yuletide Madness 2015, Yuletide Treat, disgust, envy - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 04:43:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5525807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death has seen them beg before.</p><p>It's the ones that don't beg who intrigue her..</p>
            </blockquote>





	back in your own world

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TaniaRose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaniaRose/gifts).



When one is as old as I am, you get used to the timorous sound of a begging voice. I have heard too many of those; encountered every human that has been and will encounter every human that will be; they have melded into a single screaming ball of flesh in what you humans call a memory. My memory.

Mostly.

There was one exception. The dark haired girl with the wounded eyes who begged me to spare the life of her lover. Never have I had such a battle, and I have ripped the souls from leviathans. In the end his love of her was stronger than the pull of my realm, and she kept her young lover, his body mending from the accident that felled him.

I returned to my own world to brood and consider the weight of the encounter. Comforted by the fact that there was little she could do to change the course of events.

She was a weak, mortal slip of a girl. And I? I was the equalizer. I am death. And in time, men as strong as kings and as weak as peasants would beg for my touch. She was no different. She was not special.

^&&

They married in the springtime, in a beautiful ceremony by the woods. She wore white, and a circle of pink flowers on her hair – he was handsome in a suit. Their eyes were locked and no one else in the world seems to exist for them as the day passed on.

They didn’t see me, the glitter of my attraction wan in the light of their devotion. I left a trail of wilted violets in my wake. Still, they didn’t notice my message.

But I let them have their temporary victory. One day it won’t matter. It doesn’t matter how hard they struggle against my net – I know the truth. They’d all begged me before; and they would again, the sailors and the kings. This girl would be no exception.

^&&

They were ill with pneumonia on their second anniversary, and I hovered by their hospital beds, waiting for the chance to invade, to charm and to conquer. But health clung to their lips like honey wine; they rose again, healthy, and simply continued to go about the work of the living.

^&&

The children were born and raised without trauma. They were getting arrogant now, I thought; their fecklessness close to infuriating me. Accidents shook them temporarily awake, but the children survived, and they slunk into the happy coma of city living. They thrived. And off to school they went.

Chaos took the wheel from my hand on holidays, but there were no poisonings, no bloody accidents, still.

The Old Ones accused me of being distracted; of falling in love with the warmth of them. “You’re staring too deep into the Hallmark card,” I’d been told. “You envy them for what they have fallen into, and what you cannot take but by force.”

I poisoned their fields for this, but they only healed them to golden hues of sunlight health in response.

^&&

Sixty long, endless years, I waited. My time was infinite but the process seemed endless. His hair had turned to snow and fallen out, and she had grown paunchy and grey, and yet their love. _Their love_. I burned with the envy of it, I could admit it to myself now – looked at them and wanted them to belong to me, like toys or pets. They had belonged to Fate for over eighty long years. Tonight, his body wasted, his voice a reed in the wind, the boy would finally belong to me.

I smiled as he reached toward the light, my soft, cold little hand.

“I have you now, boy,” I said, and wrapped by pale fingers around his slender wrist.

If she heard me she did not say, but she did not beg him to stay with her now.

^&&

And still, she would not come to me, even though her heart was broken. The sadness of her grief somehow made her more exquisite, more heartbreakingly beautiful than I had dreamed, but she had the shoulders of friends and family to lean on, and a garden of flowers that bloomed on in his memory.

As for the boy? I quickly discovered that the chase was more exciting than the possession. He joined his fellows above, waiting for recycling into another fleshly body.

Ten more years she hung on to that accursed earth, until she was hunched over, half-blind and forgetful. And still she had those exquisite eyes, bore more than a shadow of the beauty that had tormented me. 

Years more passed before her body could no longer sustain her heart, her will, and began to collapse. I waited in the wings. I have allowed her the succor of children, of old age, of grand children. A happy life, a joyful life.

But her afterlife? That would belong to me.

Her eyes fluttered open at my touch. The awareness I saw in them was as touching now as it was seventy years before.

I smiled, having not smiled in a century or more.

“Rise,” I instructed. “And walk with me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide!


End file.
